If you're into reading the tea leaves to determine if the rumors of OBL's death are true, this UPI report will give you plenty to play with, including the significance of the paper chosen to receive the leak.

Important bit of context on the detainee legislation and the associated debate in Congress, from the Boston Globe:

As lawmakers prepare to debate the CIA's special interrogation program for terrorism suspects, fewer than 10 percent of the members of Congress have been told which interrogation techniques have been used in the past, and none of them know which ones would be permissible under proposed changes to the War Crimes Act.

But that doesn't stop the esteemed gentleman from Alabama: "I don't know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know," said Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican.

The piece points out that the Army Field Manual spells out in detail which interrogation techniques are acceptable and which are prohibited, which undermines the Administration's contention that the details of its interrogation techniques should remain classified.

It sort of fits that the same folks who let the Administration keep them constantly in the dark don't see anything wrong with keeping alleged terrorists in the dark about the evidence against them.

Wild Bill lets loose on Fox News and lets Chris Wallace have it.

CLINTON: You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch is going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers for supporting my work on climate change. And you came here under false pretenses and said that you’d spend half the time talking about…

WALLACE: [laughs]

CLINTON: You said you’d spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7 billion dollars plus over three days from 215 different commitments. And you don’t care.

It's about time. But does this mean I have to watch Fox News Sunday?

Update: Just to be clear, the meat of the exchange and the catalyst for the sparring comes when Wallace mouths the spin of "The Path to 9/11," asserting that Clinton did not do enough to get al Qaeda.

Late update: Earlier, Fox was teasing the interview on its website with the headline, "Clinton Gets Crazed." They have now changed it to "Strong Reaction."

The reports on the possible death of Osama bin Laden are not surprisingly very contradictory at this point. Time is now reporting that, according to a Saudi source, bin Laden is ill and may have already died:

The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, says that Saudi officials have received multiple credible reports over the last several weeks that Bin Laden has been suffering from a water-borne illness. The source believes that there is a "high probability" that Bin Laden has already died from the disease, but stressed that Saudi officials have thus far received no concrete evidence of Bin Laden's death.

"This is not a rumor," says the source. "He is very ill. He got a water-related sickness and it could be terminal. There are a lot of serious facts about things that have actually happened. There is a lot to it. But we don't have any concrete information to say that he is dead."

Given the number of times his death has been reported, there's no point in speculating on which reports are accurate. We'll just have to let this one play out. I will say that typhoid is not exactly my idea of a deserved death for the man.

The NRCC has spent more than $1 million trying to hold on to Indiana's 8th District, a seat currently held by Rep. John Hostettler (R-IN). How tough is the race against Democrat Brad Ellsworth? Put it this way, Hostettler keeps a binder of opposition research in his office labeled with the name of Ellsworth's 19-year-old daughter.

TPM, across all its platforms, is making a concerted effort to track the various shadow groups involved in congressional campaigns nationwide. The 527 groups, which played such a huge role in the 2004 presidential campaign, are back with a vengeance.

While technically the 527s that take soft money are prohibited from coordinating their activities with candidates and parties, you can't fully understand the strategies and tactics of the national campaigns being waged by either party without understanding where the 527s fit into the mix.

The prohibition on coordination is one of those fine legal distinctions that makes the campaign finance laws such a mess.

Take for instance "Softer Voices," a 527 group supporting Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) in his re-election campaign against Bob Casey. Until this past week, the contact person and custodian of records for Softer Voices--the person who signed their IRS filings--was Cleta Mitchell, a partner at the DC firm of Foley & Lardner LLP and . . . wait for it . . . legal counsel to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

All of Softer Voices's contributions so far in 2006 came this past week, with $650,000 raised from just two contributors. The group turned around and spent more than $750,000, all of it on the Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race, according to the group's FEC filing. In between the recipt of the contributions and the ad buy, the group filed an amended IRS report in which Cleta Mitchell is no longer listed as contact person for the group.

You may recall the controversy that erupted in the 2004 elections when it was learned that GOP power lawyer Ben Ginsberg was representing both the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Ginsberg resigned from the Bush campaign, but his firm, Patton Boggs, still represents the Swift Boaters, collecting more than $275,000 in fees from the group since June 2005. Meanwhile, according to his bio, Ginsberg represents the RNC, NRSC, NRCC and the Republican Governors Association.

As I said, these are very fine legal distinctions.

Bob J. Perry is no longer the sole financial backer of the Economic Freedom Fund, the 527 group that reunites the Swift Boat crowd and is making a splash this year with hard-hitting ads and pernicious robo-calls in key congressional races.

It appears another GOP financial heavyweight is getting in on the fun. Carl H. Lindner, part owner of the Cincinnati Reds and No. 133 on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, has ponied up $50,000 to EFF. More precisely, EFF has recorded a $50,000 donation from the same address as Lindner uses in other FEC reports. For whatever reason, the FEC website is not showing the names of EFF's most recent contributors, just their addresses.

A mere $50,000 is a small fraction of the $5 million Perry has contributed to the group, but it suggests other big-money Republican donors may be climbing aboard Swift Boat 2.0. Lindner's contributions to President Bush's 2004 re-election campaign qualified him as a "Ranger."

EFF's most recent filings show it spending another $120,000 against John Barrow (D-GA); $105,000 against Alan Mollohan (D-WV); and $75,000 against Jim Marshall (D-GA). This is in addition to several hundred thouand dollars already spent by EFF collectively in those districts.

Osama bin Laden dead? I don't want to make too big a deal of this--yet. But according to a regional French newspaper that obtained a classified French secret service report, the Saudis are convinced bin Laden died of typhoid in August in Pakistan.

The newspaper printed what it said was a copy of the report dated September 21 and said it was shown to President Jacques Chirac, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and France's interior and defense ministers on the same day.

"According to a usually reliable source, the Saudi services are now convinced that Osama bin Laden is dead," the document said.

"The information gathered by the Saudis indicates that the head of al Qaeda was a victim while he was in Pakistan on August 23, 2006, of a very serious case of typhoid which led to a partial paralysis of his internal organs."

The report, which was stamped with a "confidential defense" label and the initials of the French secret service, said Saudi Arabia first heard the information on September 4 and that it was waiting for more details before making an official announcement.

A senior official in Pakistan said no foreign government had shared information with Pakistan that would back up the report of bin Laden's death.

Now, reports of bin Laden's death have been exaggerated before. What makes this report particularly interesting is that the French Defense Ministry has essentially confirmed the existence of the secret service report, saying publicly that while it cannot confirm that bin Laden is dead, it will launch an inquiry into the leak of the secret document and seek criminal charges against the leaker.

Late update: U.S. government unable to confirm bin Laden death report.

Later update: Not dead yet, according to CNN source.

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has a water-borne illness, a Saudi intelligence source told CNN on Saturday, knocking down a report in a French newspaper that the man who has been hunted by the United States for the past five years is dead.

The Saudi intelligence source told CNN's Nic Robertson that there have been credible reports for the past several weeks that bin Laden is ill, but there has been no word of his death.

Lovely. The Swift Boat 2.0 Group set up by Texas GOP moneyman Bob Perry is now suing the state of Indiana for infringing on the group's constitutional right to bombard the state's residents with smear-laden push-polls. Actually, to be precise, the robo-call chop shop they hired to do the push-polls -- the oddly named FreeEats.com -- is suing on their behalf. It's, well, all very complicated.

Oh Boy. Macaca's back with a vengeance. And Wonkette's got the get.

Remember, George Allen said he just made up 'Macaca', right?

Well, that's not what he told Marvin Olasky's World Magazine, a widely read evangelical weekly, a few weeks ago.

Here's what he told them ...

Allen actually had a pretty credible defense for what he said. No one—including The Washington Post, which featured the story repeatedly for several weeks—ever demonstrated that "macaca" really has such murky racial connotations in any language. But in northern Italy, where Allen's mother had close family connections, "macaca" does seem to mean "clown" or "buffoon." Allen says now that's what he was trying to communicate.

So it's a word he picked up from his mom and it means buffoon.

Or he made it up.

Or he didn't make it up and it's a slur for dark-skinned people like Webb's campaign volunteer S.R. Sidarth.

(ed.note: The article is behind World's subscription wall. The link goes to a version with only the first few paragraphs. The section I quoted is further down. But in our never-ending quest to scale the highest mountains of bamboozlement, the TPM treasury chipped in $5 for the online subscription. And we've confirmed the passage above.)

Okay, it's late on a Friday afternoon. Even evening here on the East Coast. But you've got to set aside a few moments for this one.

Here's the story of a wingnut House candidate from Colorado literally getting down on bended knee to beg for forgiveness for his youthful indiscretions trying to phase out Social Security. Just go look. It'll start you off on a good weekend.

Not sure if I buy it, but this is TPM Reader AB's view ...

It may not be as bad as it appears because it may not pass before Congress adjourns.

Rove and his allies waited to present this issue until he thought the election time was right but he did not figure on an intra- party debate to delay the bill by more than a week. So, now time is short.

Meanwhile, I am guessing that Reid made the smart decision to keep the Dems out of the "negotiations". Why should they invest what little access to media they have on a bill without details, without knowing the dimensions of the constitutional issues. He saved our little powder until now we can see how bad the bill is but it may be easier to slow down the legislative mechanism enough to get us past adjournment, especially if we get a little help from Duncan Hunter and his buddies in the House.

So, let's not panic. Reid may be playing our cards right and, if so, this accounts for the silence of Feingold and Durbin and the others we would have thought to have been breathing fire.

I've never known this crew for being much for procedural proprieties, let alone the rule of law all that other fussiness when an election is on the line. But who knows?

One-time Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky on torture.

TPM Reader ZN with a follow up ...

I think DOK is taking some liberties in summarizing the torture article in the Atlantic. It actually came to the conclusion that systemic and routine torture don't work. If there is a definite time constraint, and the admissibility isn't an issue, i.e. stopping a ticking bomb, then torture may help get the information. The author thinks torture should remain illegal because if it is legalized even in this specific situation the possibility of abuse is to great. If it is illegal and the men and women who would commit it know that then they have to decide that the benefit is worth the possible penalty before they do it. If it is ever legal then stretching and interpretation of the situation come into play. If it is never legal then jury nullification or prosecutorial discretion is the only defense.

I think ZN's take on the relationship between the rule of law, the wrongness of torture and the role of the far-fetched hypothetical that is often introduced into the debate is the closest to my own.

It's a point I discussed at some length in this post in June 2004.

TPM Reader BC has this follow up ...

Besides prosecutorial discretion and jury nullification, there is always the presidential pardon option. To me, this demonstrates that Bush doesn’t have in mind rare cases of torture- which, if proved vital, or event useful, could be pardoned. He wants it to be a regular procedure, for which pardons would be unwieldy given the number of people needing them.

I think that's it exactly.

Paul Kiel has been at work trying to trace back the call numbers of the push-polls being funded by Swift Boat kingpin Bob Perry. Oddly enough, the trail led him back to an escort service. But they weren't available to speak with him. Find out the latest on our continuing hunt for the truth here.

Terrorism expert and former DOJ official Juliette Kayyem gives us her take on the torture bill deal.

TPM Reader DOK ...

Reading this debate gives me the same sick feeling in my stomach that I got when I read the Atlantic Monthly article that came to the same conclusion as your previous commenter: torture doesn’t work, but we should do it any way and pretend we don’t. Like most Americans, I used to buy into this kind of cynicism. Government secrecy is the fuel that feeds all conspiracy theories. What changed my mind was watching the people who have stood up against torture. It has not been humanitarian organizations, movie stars or bleeding heart liberals, but the military and CIA.

Like all macho Hollywood clichés that this administration has put into practice, reality has a way of not following the script. The Democrats were no where to be seen. There was no public outcry on which to ride, no Democrats making a fuss, and no media wanting to give their opposition much play, but they did it anyway. Why is it the very people our President demands have the authority to engage in torture are the only ones willing to stand up and resist these policies, even when they know their protests will fall on deaf ears?

Because there views on torture were not formed in multiplexes, but on the ground, pursuing real bad guys. Because it doesn’t work. Because they know better than anybody this policy will not help us, but hurt us. It tells me that even in the back rooms, in secret, under the radar with no oversight or accountability, our government would not do what our country is now willing to embrace out in the open under President Bush.

Let us know what you think?

JC adds his two cents ...

One other aspect of this:

Right now, CIA are the bad guys. As far as I know, military interrogators were not using "coercive techniques."

However, if this bill passes, military interrogators will not only be ALLOWED to use them, they will be EXPECTED to use them.

Which is one reason so many military people have come out against it. Before Hamdan, they were expected to leave the room before the CIA guy got started. Now, they'll be expected to stay - and help.

But that CIA guy is never going to be out on the street patrolling, subject to capture. The military guy is.

Think about it.

I'm thinking.

Dem Diane Farrell hits Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT) for his support of the war in Iraq.